The Competition between Inhibition of Return and Emotional Attention Bias: Evidence from Eye Movements

Jian GUAN Wen-Rui Li

Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2018, Vol. 41 ›› Issue (6) : 1353-1358.

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PDF(744 KB)
Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2018, Vol. 41 ›› Issue (6) : 1353-1358.

The Competition between Inhibition of Return and Emotional Attention Bias: Evidence from Eye Movements

  • Jian GUANWen-Rui Li2, 3
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Abstract

Emotional stimuli usually gain attention bias. Inhibition of Return (IOR) forbids people’s attention to already-attended objects, and promotes their detection to the new information in the scene during visual search. They are two adaptive and evolved mechanisms, but priority for the two is unknow. In the current study, we recorded participants’ eye movements using an ASL-H6 eye tracker to explore how these two mechanisms interplay during cognitive processing. Experiment used the classic exogenous cue-target paradigm, to investigated how these two competitive attention resources when different emotional pictures are presented at target position. Each experimental session was preceded by a 9-point eye-tracker calibration and validation procedure. A written reminder of the task instruction followed validation. Instructions were to identify stimulis’ emotional valence as fast and as accurately as possible and report its valence by pressing buttons on a keyboard. Each trial started with two position holders and a central fixation on the screen for 800 ms, follow a “★” on left or right about 200ms. Then, go back to the first picture, after 300ms, fixation “+” was replaced by a “★”, and first picture presented for 300-400ms (eliminate fatigue and expectations). At last, a picture was showed equally probably on the valid or invalid position. Every participant completed 360 trials in total (24 practice trials, 336 experimental trials). 30 college right-handed students participated. Results showed that the reaction time to target in valid-cued locations was significantly longer than that in invalid-cued locations, indicating the IOR effect. Compared with positive and neural stimuli, negative stimuli have longer reaction time. There is a main effect on emotional types. In addition, the analysis of eye movements data showed a main effect of emotional type. In Region of interest (ROI), negative stimulis have more fixations, longer saccade latency and total fixation duration. Indicaing that emotional informaton induce attention bias. In conclusion,we found IOR effect is stable, and result from eye movements indicating that emotional information have an impact on earlier attention capture.

Key words

emotional attention bias / IOR / eye movements

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Jian GUAN Wen-Rui Li. The Competition between Inhibition of Return and Emotional Attention Bias: Evidence from Eye Movements[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2018, 41(6): 1353-1358
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